In 1998, Junji Kamaya felt
like an exile in some backwater, cut off as he was from the
mobile-phone mania sweeping Japan. An engineer at TKAI Inc., a Web
consulting firm in Portland, Ore., Kamaya had to put up with the
local fare--old-fashioned pagers or analog phones--while friends
back home in Japan played with the latest Web phones, bombarding one
another with e-mails while on the go. When his company, now called
Ion Global, opened an office in Tokyo in 1999, Kamaya jumped at the
chance to return to the cradle of the mobile Web
culture.
Kamaya has more than made up for lost time. The
28-year-old gadget fanatic now carries two Web phones and a
data-communications card that provides a fast wireless hookup for
whatever he plugs it into: his personal digital assistant, digital
camera, or laptop computer. Kamaya's favorite? A sleek new
camera-phone from Sharp. "I take pictures wherever I go," he says,
holding up the featherweight handset.
He points the $150
phone at a colleague, clicks a button, and then, with several more
clicks, sends the picture as an e-mail attachment to his co-worker's
cell phone. The end result is a color image of astonishingly good
clarity. If he had wanted, he could have typed in a note to go along
with the snapshot.
A STEP AHEAD. Advanced, easy-to-use
handsets, innovative services, and hassle-free networks--this is the
mantra of Japanese wireless carriers. While much of the rest of the
developed world wrestles with clunky phones, spotty connections, and
hard-to-use mobile Net services, Japan has stayed a step ahead. And
it has nothing to do with third-generation (3G) services, the first
of which was rolled out in October in Tokyo by NTT DoCoMo (NTDMY ). For
now, everyone seems content with Japan's existing second-generation,
or 2G, digital networks that provide always-on connections for data
transmission and support a wide range of online services--from news,
weather, and ticket-booking to downloads of games and ring
tones.
Numbers tell the story. Of Japan's 66 million
cell-phone users, fully two-thirds subscribe to one or more of the
mobile data services offered by the country's three cellular
operators. The most popular is DoCoMo's i-mode, with more than 28
million subscribers. KDDI's EZweb and J-Sky, operated by the
up-and-coming J-Phone, each serve around 9 million people. Much of
the data traffic takes the form of e-mail, but there's plenty of
demand for online mobile services as well. Already, there are an
estimated 50,000 Web sites formatted for i-mode
subscribers.
Kamaya's new camera-phone, with its
picture-messaging capability, is about to become the Next Big Thing.
Like 2 million others who have purchased a camera-phone, he
regularly sends pictures to friends while shopping, traveling, or
simply hanging out. "It's the picture postcard that you can send
anytime and anywhere," he says. To illustrate, Kamaya clicks on one
from a friend waiting for him at a party. It shows a close-up of a
bottle of Guinness beer, with a note saying, "Hurry up, Guinness is
waiting for you!"
For those who crave the cutting edge, there
are DoCoMo's impressive 3G handsets. One is a Panasonic videophone
that captures and sends high-quality color movies at a speed that is
practically real time. But with a hefty $500 price and service
limited to just Tokyo now, DoCoMo so far has sold about 10,000
handsets.
Even Kamaya, the cell-phone maniac, is biding his
time. "I really don't need another gadget to carry around," he
quips. When he can buy a videophone with a built-in handheld
computer that works nationwide, you can bet he'll be the first in
line.
By Irene M. Kunii in
Tokyo
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